Eggs With Legs Sprint 10 & 11 Reflection

This is it; we are officially done with the game for this semester. We’ve shipped our final product, and I’m really happy with where it is.

We have a viable vertical slice of a game!  You can customize your robot with three different weapons, shields, and extenders to add even more parts (within limits, of course).  We’ve got my level in, although most of the traps are disabled since they aren’t fully functional yet.  There is an enemy with a really basic AI, background music, and the lighting, which I’ve been working on, has come out much better than I had even hoped!  We prerecorded our greenlight presentation, so all that’s left is to watch everyone else’s tonight!  The video for our presentation is at the bottom of the page, as well.

I think that knowledgeable gamers would enjoy Junkpunk as it is, at least as a demo.  While it certainly wouldn’t hold up if we tried to charge money for it, I think that people would have fun playing it as a proof-of-concept, which was exactly our goal this semester.  I think that they would say that our UI needs work, especially for building a robot, that the game needs to teach the player how to play, more art (of course), and that there needs to be more parts to choose from, but that we have a very good start.  Our target audience for the game is STEM students and engineers since they typically like making things.  I think that they’d like the game too, since it allows for creativity and for people to play their own way.  I don’t really think hardcore first-person-shooter fans would really like this game very much, nor would people who don’t enjoy more sandbox-y type games.  The game is too open-ended for that at the moment, and the gameplay is yet to be polished enough to appeal to hardcore FPS fans.  It’s also just a very different game to an FPS and has completely different motivators on Quantic Foundry. 

However, I think that we’ve come such a long way since we started.  I am so incredibly happy with the game now, even though this was originally my least favorite idea of the three, even if I still really liked it.  The level and lighting came out so much better than I could have hoped, even though it was my first time messing with lighting and post-processing effects.  I’m excited to play with them even more when/if we add more levels after getting through to next semester.  I have high hopes that our game will be greenlit and feel like we have a pretty good chance.  I really hope we do, since I want to see this game to completion, although working for another team and onboarding would be really valuable experience as well.